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Where Have All the Shoe Stores Gone?

FOR years, as West 47th Street was the place to go for diamonds, West Eighth Street was the destination for shoes, from ankle boots and high-tops to platforms and pumps.

Now, however, the street's once-brisk retail business, concentrated on the block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, seems to have stumbled.

Twelve empty stores line the block, with additional "For Rent" signs taped on windows on next-door MacDougal Street and Avenue of the Americas. And merchants predict that some of the 18 holdouts will close by summer.

It's not just footwear that has fallen on hard times. The longtime poster gallery Psychedelic Solution Gallery closed last fall, and Club W8th, the dance club, also shut its doors. Even many of the ear piercers and hookah hawkers that lured suburban teens have left.

West Eighth's story also seems to be defying the laws of gentrification. Although nearby town houses sell for upwards of some one-bedroom apartments in the neighborhood sell for more than $1 million, upscale commercial tenants are nowhere to be seen.

"There's not too much charm and character here; it's pretty rough and tumble," said Caroline Banker, an executive vice president who analyzes retail leasing at Insignia Douglas Elliman and who remembers shopping on West Eighth in the 1970's when it was "cutting edge."

If the block had wider sidewalks and storefronts, or even a cobblestone street, it might be better positioned for a renaissance, she said.

The shoe business was also hurt by competition from boutiques on West Broadway and Bleecker Street, Ms. Banker said.

A large anchor tenant could spark a revitalization, but only if the move is coordinated with the block's landlords, who say they are trying to improve the fortunes of the block by bringing in a mix of businesses. But the process, they say, is slow and frustrating.

Blame, like incense smoke, lies everywhere.

"When something leaks, it takes six months for the landlords to fix it," said James Prophets, a salesman at Maor Shoes at No. 23. Business is off 75 percent in just one year, said Bela Mo, another salesman. A tangle of ducts and wires are visible through two holes in the ceiling, and in the corner sits a stack of plywood. "There's nobody helping nobody," Mr. Prophets said.

Their landlord, Dan Birnant, whose West Realty Company owns three contiguous buildings on the north side of the block, strongly disagreed. "I never heard that," Mr. Birnant said. "As soon as there is a report, we send over repairmen right away."

Other tenants say that improvement is coming slowly because building ownership is concentrated in too few hands.

"There should be a limit to how much somebody can own on one block," said Jennifer Mizrachi, who has owned the Shoe Closet at No. 9 for 22 years but had to close a different store on the block last August. That space is still empty.

Yet Mr. Birnant said the opposite is true, that because his stake is so high he has more of an incentive to rehabilitate the block. "Everybody is looking for the best they can here, even if it's coming around more slowly than we would like," he said.

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Others on the block say not enough has been done by the 12-year-old business improvement district, the Village Alliance, which makes sure garbage is collected and graffiti is cleaned in exchange for a tax on participating businesses.

According to Arnold Warwick, who has lived in Greenwich Village since 1949 and now manages No. 29, which houses a shoe store, Shoe Review, and a tattoo parlor, the BID, which is made up of local merchants, has not done enough to bring restaurants, record stores and art supply shops to the block, to make it look like it did in the mid-1960's.

"The BID is an absolute waste of money," Mr. Warwick said.

Honi Klein, the executive director of the Village Alliance, said that she believes the vacancy rate is only 4 percent, although a quick scan of Eighth Street between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas suggests it is far higher. She did not return repeated phone calls seeking a clarification.

Ms. Klein is currently trying to increase the BID's size. In the winter, she petitioned Community Board No. 2, which represents the area, to add 10 blocks to the district's current nine-block size, for a total of 19 blocks. Though a committee initially denied Ms. Klein's request, the full board approved it in March. The proposal still needs to go before the city's Division of Business Assistance for final approval.

In the meantime, landlords say they are making progress reinventing the block on their own. A year ago, Norman Buchbinder, who co-owns nine buildings on the block, leased a 750-square-foot space in a former Tibetan goods store at No. 28 to Remixx Fashions, a leather and denim clothing store from Jamaica, Queens. A month ago, the store's owner, Linda Bekye, also opened a salon, Visions, in the 500-square-foot basement. Six months ago, Sound Sleep Foam and Futon relocated from the Lower East Side to a 3,250-square-foot former dress shop at No. 56.

Food may soon replace shoes in some of the stores. Within the next two months, Mr. Buchbinder said, Choux Factory, a cream puff bakery, will open in a 600-square-foot former shoe store at No. 58. Also, a juice store is negotiating to rent a 350-square-foot former shoe store at No. 50, he said.

"It's taken a long time to kill the dragon," Mr. Buchbinder said of his efforts to replace shoe stores with other businesses.

Still, these spaces, which could be leased for $150 a square foot a decade ago, now only fetch $75, Mr. Buchbinder said. Rents were forced down, he said, by the oversaturation of shoe stores, plus the development of hipper retail areas like NoHo and NoLIta. "Most people want shopping to be like walking through a playground, so you're entertained" by a diversity of stores, he said.

Pressure to spruce up the block has also come from preservationists, who have long argued that the garish window displays and signage don't belong in the Greenwich Village Historic District.

After all, the street's artistic heritage is hefty. The first Whitney Museum -- now the Art Deco home of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture -- was at No. 8, a few doors down from Gertrude Whitney's apartment and studio. Jimi Hendrix lived in a small cottage behind No. 50, where he also built his Electric Lady Studios in 1970.

"It's full of surprises if you look up above those honky-tonk storefronts," said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

Yet he agreed that the solution is not going to be simple. "There's definitely a complex set of challenges here," Mr. Berman said. "Eighth Street is a world unto itself."

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A version of this article appears in print on May 1, 2005, on Page 11011010 of the National edition with the headline: SQUARE FEET/West Eighth Street; Where Have All the Shoe Stores Gone?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe